Building Houses in Building Science

Many of my recent posts have been about the cool things going on in the organizations I’m involved with on campus, so I am switching it up this week and writing about the cool stuff I’m learning in my classes. This week my midterm project for my Building Science studio class is due, so I thought I would take the time to explain my project and what we’ve done so far in the class!

My Building Science class this year is based on midterm and final projects of architectural design. Our midterm assignment was a group project where we designed a two-story resident in Malibu, complete with structural engineering calculations, structural plans, and details. Our houses will be entirely wood construction, and shaped like a rectangle or triangle. My group got the rectangular house assignment. Here’s the assignment:

Midterm project outline

We’ve been working on this project since the first week of the semester, and are finally ready to present it! This project is really exciting because although we’ve learned how to do the majority of these calculations for various materials in our other Civil Engineering classes, we haven’t put them all together into one large design project. The goal is by the time we graduate from USC with our Civil Engineering (Building Science) degree, we will have already learned in our classes what would take us two years working in the industry to learn. Here are some of our plans and drawings for our house:

A-0 – Site Plan

A-1 – First Floor Plan

A-2 – Second Floor Plan

A-5 – Elevations

For our final project, we will be modifying the structural system of our house, as well as adding other cool features. Stay tuned for that post in December!